from the spreading-the-knowledge dept

As Techdirt has noted many times, the patent system is broken, and in various ways. One major problem is the way it inhibits innovation, rather than promoting it, as its supporters usually claim. Here's why:

The patent system was created to advance societal benefit by encouraging clearly defined public disclosure of inventions, in exchange for a strictly limited monopoly. The intent is that the invention may be used wherever and whenever the patent monopoly is not in force.

The trouble is that unless information is readily available about whose patents are in force over what technology where, the system doesn't work well. People may unwittingly infringe patents they don't know about, avoid areas of innovation in which they are entitled to be creative, or make poor investments based on incomplete information about which rights are granted and who holds these rights.

to create transparency in the patent system, and to serve the public worldwide as a platform to explore, understand and improve its impact on society. The Lens informatics tools can assist the user to determine the boundaries of intellectual property constraints on deliverable innovations, and usable building blocks for future innovations.

he's trying to radically transform the entire system of innovation to make it more inclusive and local: He wants a system that empowers farmers in Africa to invent their own solutions, rather than looking to multinational corporations for fixes.

The problem is that patents do not promote innovation in those contexts:

the people who need new solutions most, like farmers in developing countries, are isolated in a system that discourages ground-level innovation. Instead, we have a small group of companies in rich countries, with a stranglehold on patents, designing all the solutions to fit their own business models. This system works primarily to bring in money for these companies, to maintain their privilege, and to exclude competition.

More specifically, the problem is that:

the patent system has grown so complex that only a few experts understand it. It's impossible for normal people to navigate the patent thickets to discover the treasures there, or see the dangers. And these days everything from a cellphone to a seed requires dozens of separate patents for the component parts. The solution, he said, is mapping it out: what he calls "innovation cartography."

The rest of the Grist article explores Jefferson's ideas further, and is well-worth reading. It includes a wonderful historical parallel from the 16th century -- involving a different kind of map:

the Iberian peninsula controlled all the information needed to send merchant ships to Asia (and, to a large extent, the New World as well). The Iberians had invested heavily in research and development, sending out De Gama, Magellan, Dias, Columbus, all those explorers to map the world. And because they were the only Europeans with reliable maps of the East Indies -- these maps were state secrets -- the Iberians had a monopoly.

The result was great wealth and power for those that controlled the maps, but also stagnation within their industries, because they had no need to innovate -- the money kept rolling in anyway. The parallels with the present state of the patent system, where large returns are possible without the need to innovate further, are clear.

But back in the 16th century, something happened:

Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was working as a secretary for the Portuguese archbishop in Goa, India. In that capacity, he traveled all over the world. Somewhere along the way, he got his hands on the Portuguese maps, and he copied them.

He not only copied them, he made them freely available, with dramatic effects on the entire world:

Linschoten published the maps in 1596. The British East India Company started in 1600; the Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602. The Dutch East India Company also represented an innovation in financing: It was the first joint stock company, and its formation gave rise to trade in options and derivatives. Once the maps were available and the Iberian monopoly was broken, new ideas flowered, and new investment flowed.

Now we have a similar situation, Jefferson said. There is a tremendous opportunity -- not in mapping Asia and the Americas, but in mapping the patent system and all of its related knowledge.

This is how Jefferson thinks the Lens will be used to unleash a new wave of investment and innovation, just as Linschoten's maps did:

anyone can look up patents and grab recipes for creating technologies. This is especially true of the people who need innovation most, because patents don't apply in most developing countries. Patents can only stop use of an invention in the country in which they're granted. An enterprising Ugandan company could look up the instructions for Monsanto's seeds in the patent literature, and build them tomorrow, without breaking the law, Jefferson said. The innovators and entrepreneurs are out there, he said -- they just need the maps to show investors that the technology exists and their plans are legal and feasible.

It's a radical approach: using the patent system to provide both the raw ideas that might help developing countries, as well as key information about where that can be done without running into legal problems. In other words, it's all about putting the missing transparency back into patents.

from the owning-up dept

We've had a few posts about plagiarism here on Techdirt, and how it differs from copyright infringement. One important question that needs to be considered is: what's the correct way to acknowledge and correct plagiarism when it is discovered? Probably not like this, in a case pointed out to us by Ivan Oransky via Jonathan Eisen, and reported by Retraction Watch:

PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] has a curious correction in a recent issue. A group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York, it seems, had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher -- what we might call plagiarism, in a less charitable mood.

To paraphrase Beyoncé: If you like it, better put some quotation marks around it. But we're pretty sure she meant before, not after, the fact.

That is, the PNAS correction simply put quotation marks around the text that had been, er, borrowed, and then linked the new quotations to the original paper. The problem with this approach is that it fails to acknowledge the plagiarism -- the text simply says that some of the descriptions were "not appropriately noted in our article" -- or the real magnitude of contribution from others, since multiple passages link to a reference at the end of the article. As a result, PNAS ends up looking rather pathetic for attempting to play down what happened in this way. As some in the lively comments section on the Retraction Watch piece note, it would have been far better to retract the entire article, re-write and re-submit it.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Sometimes we can't even agree on the definitions of words, so it's not too hard to find examples of changes in communication technologies altering how we use words. Text messages on phones have made us lazy to spell words correctly or to spell out entire words or common phrases. Language is inherently flexible, and here are just a few ways some parts of our language have changed.

from the worth-a-thousand-words? dept

In prep for writing this short piece, I was surprised to learn that apparently eBay sellers sending pictures of items, rather than the items themselves, to buyers was something that existed. It's obviously a shady sense of humor that thinks bilking buyers out of their money this way is funny. I guess there are lots of ways it can happen, between ambiguously worded sell posts and incomplete reading by buyers. I imagine the latter is often fueled by a newly released item that is in high demand.

Peter Clatworthy thought he had bought one of the consoles on the auction site, but actually received a picture of one. The Post highlighted his story today, with Mr Clatworthy having now received a refund with the help of eBay.

Well, good on eBay for doing the refund, but this wasn't just a simple matter of a jackass seller sending the picture when he or she had promised the console. The actual seller listing did indeed promise a picture, not a console.

Despite the listing stating it was a photo of an XBox One Day One edition console, Mr Clatworthy said he’d expected to receive the console as it was listed in the video games and consoles category on eBay.

He instead received the photo in the post on Monday, with it having ‘thank you for your purchase’ written on the back.

I imagine somebody did the listing as a joke and then found out someone had purchased it after obviously not reading the listing carefully. That doesn't absolve the seller from completing the purchase process, obviously, but it does serve as a warning for all of us during this holiday shopping season. Read what you're buying, people.

from the i-keep-a-gun-holstered,-but-only-on-the-right-side,-that's-the-cop-side dept

Good news, citizens! You have the right to refuse a warrantless search of your premises. It's a right that's guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. But that right won't protect you from the consequences of your failure to roll over for law enforcement. Nope, the right to not be subjected to a warrantless search can actually be held against you -- not in a court of law, mind you -- but by the police themselves.

Eric Crinnian, an attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, says police came to his door looking for parole violators, and got upset when he refused them permission to tramp through his house and paw through his possessions. In fact, he claims, one cop went so far as to threaten to shoot his dogs if he made them abide by the requirements of the law by getting a search warrant to look through his home.

“If we have to get a warrant, we’re going to come back when you’re not expecting it, we’re going to park in front of your house, where all your neighbors can see, we’re gonna bust in your door with a battering ram, we’re gonna shoot and kill your dogs [...] and then we’re going to ransack your house looking for these people.”

This sounds suspiciously like a threat (several threats, actually). This is the classic "you can do this the easy way or the hard way" persuasion technique that's been deployed by law enforcement since there's been law enforcement. Even when not spoken out loud, the "or else" always hangs in the air when LEOs "ask nicely" for permission to do things they can't legally do without your consent.

John Hamilton, an associate professor of criminal justice administration at Park University and a retired Major with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, told the news station that the officers' threats may not be illegal, though they're inappropriate and it's possible they violate department policy. He also pointed to the matter of appearances, saying that such behavior "makes it tenuous when you appear in front of the court in a case like that."

Not exactly illegal, but not very helpful should this incident result in a lawsuit. In fact, Missouri's laws give police officers leeway to make threats such as these without repercussion, as Reason's J.D. Tucille notes.

Missouri has a statute that defines a "credible threat… against the life of, or a threat to cause physical injury to, or the kidnapping of, the person, the person's family, or the person's household members or domestic animals or livestock" as aggravated stalking and might fit the bill in this situation. However, that law explicitly exempts law enforcement officers "conducting investigations of violation of federal, state, county, or municipal law," which is more than a little disturbing.

In all likelihood, the citizen who exercised his Fourth Amendment rights will be the only one who is punished (in one fashion or another) for the officer's threats. Making these allegations public will decrease the likelihood of the KCPD following through on its offer to tear apart Crinnian's home and shoot his pets. Of course, this could just as easily go the other way. The PD has already promised to retaliate for his refusal to permit an unconstitutional search. It may up its level of retribution in the wake of this public embarrassment.

Some people have hypothesized that the police officer was merely describing the normal warrant execution process rather than threatening to retaliate by causing gratuitous property damage. I think it's worth noting that these are not inconsistent. It would not surprise me to learn that the police routinely retaliate against people who make their lives difficult by causing gratuitous damage during the warrant execution process.

No-knock warrants are always more damaging than those announced by a knock on the door. Police use different tactics depending on their perception of the person they're serving the warrant to. People with the power and money to retaliate in court are often handled with more respect (and less collateral damage) than those that are perceived to be powerless (yet somehow more dangerous). Note how an arrest of celebrity is carried out much differently than arrests of millions of nobodies.

"We'll come back with a warrant, but we'll make you wish you had consented earlier." It's almost extortion and yet, it's almost certainly not punishable under Missouri law. Gotta love that Fourth Amendment protection, which grants you the right to turn down a warrantless search, but instead subjects you to a violent, noisy, destructive search of your house once the proper paperwork is secured.

Hopefully, Crinnian's public complaint will either a) force the KCPD to conduct an orderly, non-dog-shooting search of his premises or b) move any judge asked to sign this warrant makes sure the KCPD has dotted every evidentiary "i" and crossed every reasonably suspicious "t." Better yet, let's hope it convinces the PD to drop its apparently errant investigation of Crinnian.

But the underlying message is both terrible and crystal clear. You are protected from illegal searches, but not from petty retaliation conducted under the color of law. The system has checks and balances, but these are essentially meaningless when the balance of power has shifted this far out of whack.

from the borderline-scams dept

There have been a few stories over the past year or so of Kickstarter projects simply taking products found elsewhere (often China) slapping a new label on them and claiming they're new. This pretty clearly violates Kickstarter rules, which includes the following:

Projects cannot resell items or offer rewards not produced by the project or its creator.

There have been a few cases in the past where this has popped up. Last year there was the Ambiolight and earlier this year there was the machined gamers dice -- both of which were called out by people in the comments as being mere reselling of products made by others already on the market.

It appears that others keep trying to do these kinds of reseller setups, tricking users along the way. A few weeks ago, I saw the projects for "Full of Fuel" external batteries. I have a bit of an obsession with external battery packs, and have been personally using a fantastic Anker Astro Pro 20,000mAh battery -- which looked nearly identical to one of the Fuel of Fire batteries. The other two Fuel of Fire batteries also looked like other external batteries already on the market. Thankfully, plenty of people started pointing out similar things in the comments. The guy behind the project initially defended it, claiming that they had "changed the design" but many didn't believe it. The guy behind the project apparently promised to send a sample to one of the most vocal critics to prove that it was different... but then stopped responding altogether, and the project was cancelled (apparently by Kickstarter).

It appears that something similar is happening with the so-called Rock Smartwatch, which launched with a bit of hype, including some odd claims such as that the watch had 1080p resolution (huh? on a watch?!?) and 4GB of RAM. Some folks quickly pointed out that the watch appeared to be nothing more than a rebranded Z3 watch from China. There was a fair bit of evidence to support this. The creator of the project, "Vak Sambath" first started claiming that he was devastated and suggesting that their manufacturing partner had somehow leaked or made different versions of their work.

Then he started posting a bizarre "defense" in which he claims to have been "in conversations with our engineers, manufacturers and designers" to then explain why it's different than the Z3.

This comment got posted a whole bunch of times... and it also seems to claim that all their work has really been focused on software, suggesting that perhaps they were just using standard Chinese watches and rewriting the software. Of course, if that were true then they should have said so upfront, and his previous claim that seeing the same design elsewhere devastated him and was because of someone in China leaking the designs makes no sense at all. Keep that in mind, because as this story moves forward, there are more and more things that "make no sense at all."

Because, he then posted a different, but equally unintelligible comment claiming those first comments in which he defended the watch weren't really from him, but were because his computer got hacked:

Hey Guys... first and foremost... I'd like to apologize for whatever happened to do. It wasn't me. I wasn't in front of my computer all day. Someone got into my account. When it rains it pours guys. This is the real Vak. My account got hacked from some freaking hot mess reason. This hasn't been easy.

Later he came back and again defended the watch, while admitting that it does not have 1080p, but not explaining why he'd made that claim originally (or apologizing for the blatantly false advertising, which seems like an FTC violation).

Then he tried again by claiming that most people are just too dumb to understand what they're doing, and saying that people "who don't like change" are too critical:

We appreciate kickstarter for allowing small companies to enter new markets with new ideas, that may not be popular with a small sector that does not like change.

The rock is taking a more innovative approach that some may find hard to understand since it is a new direction.

He also keeps talking up patents that the company has, which supposedly distinguishes the watch from its competitors. Except when people in the comments asked him which patents Vak responded by claiming the patents were proprietary so he couldn't share them and telling critics to contact the company's lawyers. Uh, that's not how patents work. If you have a patent it's public. That's one of the key points of a patent in the first place, to disclose to the public. It's possible that they have patent applications that haven't been published yet, but having an application is very different than claiming you have a patented technology.

Then there's his attempt to explain why he won't give a straight answer, claiming that if you email his legal team they'll give answers but that "the comment section is not an appropriate platform to voice speculation, since there are many experts as pyntail,engineers and large companies involved."

I've read this comment over and over again and it's totally nonsensical. First of all, the comments are exactly the right platform for backers to ask these kinds of questions to make sure they're not getting scammed, and no one's asking him to "speculate," but rather to answer some basic questions concerning the product he claims to be selling. How could anyone think it's appropriate when being quizzed about questions on your own product that only you should be able to answer, to instead claim that it's inappropriate to engage in speculation. And, um, if there are many "experts" then that seems like all the more reason to have a full and open discussion.

On Saturday morning, things took an even weirder twist, as Vak suddenly decided to just start posting over and over and over again in the comments pretending that they were getting lots of "great encouragement" from their backers, and those backers were asking questions. So he started answering them, but each time he posted, plenty of critics just kept commenting about Vak's own ridiculous claims and calling out that the whole thing was a scam. And rather than respond, Vak just kept posting the same exact "email answers" over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, perhaps in the faulty belief that this would somehow drown out all those calling him out.

The other odd thing was that some folks noticed that even as a ton of people bailed from the project earlier in the week, there was suddenly an influx of new buyers, according to Kicktraq's data:

But, since Kickstarter shows who backs the projects, some people pointed out that nearly all of the new backers had just joined in December and this was the only project they were backing. For example, here's "Dianne Barrymore" who joined in December, only backed the Rock, and also just happened to post two overly excited comments about it, even after everyone had pointed out the whole thing was likely a scam. Others pointed out that despite all the new backers, the total money raised seemed to be staying about steady, suggesting that many of the new backers may have only contributed the bare minimum of a dollar...

Finally, around noon on Saturday, Kickstarter stepped in and cancelled the deal, at about the same time Vak was insisting the fact that Kickstarter had approved the campaign was proof that it was legit. In an email to backers, Kickstarter's Trust & Safety team admitted that the project clearly violated numbers rules:

A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include:

A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere

Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project

Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator

Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners

Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part.

Either way, I expect we'll see more of this sort of thing happening over time, but it's kind of neat to see the community itself work all of the details out and help out these questionable projects (even as it's funny to see the project creators try to tap dance around their claims).

from the good-to-see dept

With the latest round of TPP negotiations ongoing, the folks over at Huffington Post got a hold of two leaked documents including a very useful spreadsheet highlighting all of the positions and areas of disagreement concerning every chapter of the TPP. What's quite revealing (and very good to see, though we'll see how it holds up) is that on many of the worst proposals, it appears that the US is very isolated, with either no one agreeing or maybe just one or two other countries agreeing. Of course, the US is obviously the most powerful force in these negotiations, so never underestimate the ability of the USTR to pressure countries to agree to these harmful policies -- but so far, it appears that other governments have been willing to push back on the US's extreme view of corporate sovereignty ("investor dispute resolution settlements") which would allow companies to ignore the laws of countries and sue those countries for "lost profits" when they disagree with the legal regime (say, for example, if a patent they wanted isn't granted). These programs have been a disaster in current agreements, and hopefully it appears that other countries now recognize this.

It also appears that the US is somewhat isolated in its intellectual property proposals. Only Australia and Peru agree with the US's "patentability criteria." And no one at all agrees with the US's plans for extra protection for patents or to extend protections to new uses (such as plants, animals and surgical procedures). The US is also the only one supporting programs favorable to pharmaceutical companies around data protection. On the copyright side, it appears that everyone disagrees with the US's view of parallel importation (which, if still the same as it was from the last leaked version, disagrees with the US Supreme Court's own ruling on parallel importation). Only the US wants "establishment of criminal offenses for unintentional infringements of copyright, related rights and trademarks."

This is good to see -- but, again, the US is the most powerful voice in the room, and you won't believe the tricks that the USTR will pull to try to bend other countries to agree to these proposals. Hopefully, though, the other countries stand firm. Hell, the fact that so many other countries agree on so many other proposals suggests that perhaps they should just kick the US out and make their own agreement.

Oh, and the US isn't only isolated in pushing for bad proposals. It's also isolated in rejecting some proposals as well. For example, there's a proposal in the e-commerce chapter on "privacy obligations" which everyone has agreed to... except the US. Gee, the US not interested in privacy protections? I wonder why...

from the about-time dept

Since the Snowden leaks began we've highlighted that the US internet companies should be furious about the NSA's actions, because it was almost certainly going to harm their ability to get any business outside of the US. Some of the companies seemed to be lying low, and we argued they should be speaking out and fighting back. While many of them did decide to sue for greater transparency, we argued that transparency was just one issue, and not even the most important one. About a month ago, with the revelations of the NSA infiltrating data centers, it appeared to finally dawn on the major internet companies that this was a serious issue.

Increase Oversight and Accountability (such as by making FISA an adversarial process)

Transparency About Government Demands

Respecting the Free Flow of Information

Avoiding Conflicts Among Governments

With the website, they've also sent a specific open letter to the government highlighting why this is important, focusing on the rights of individuals and the ability to keep their information private.

We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.

For our part, we are focused on keeping users’ data secure — deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope.

We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight.

Some will, undoubtedly, argue that this is all just noise for the sake of public perception, but compare what these companies are doing to the major telco companies, which not only have refused to comment on all of this, but have actively fought efforts by their own shareholders to make them just slightly more transparent (up to the level many internet companies were even before the Snowden leaks).

The question, now, is how much effort these companies will really put into getting Congress to change the laws. There are a number of different bills in Congress. Having the tech companies assist the efforts for real reform would certainly be helpful.

from the Permeance-vs.-Permission dept

Below are the images and text of a Pecha Kucha talk I gave in Champaign, IL. The Pecha Kucha format is 20 slides x 20 seconds per slide. Hopefully the video will be online within a few months.

You are an information portal. Information enters through your senses, like your ears and eyes, and exits through your expressions, like your voice, your drawing, your writing, and your movements. In order for culture to stay alive, we have to be open, or permeable. According to Wikipedia, Permeance is "the degree to which a material admits a flow of matter or energy." We are the material through which information flows. It’s through this flow that culture stays alive and we stay connected to each other. Ideas flow in, and they flow out, of each of us. Ideas change a little as they go along; this is known as evolution, progress, or innovation. But thanks to Copyright, we live in a world where some information goes in, but cannot legally come out. Often I hear people engaged in creative pursuits ask, “Am I allowed to use this? I don’t want to get in trouble.” In our Copyright regime, "trouble" may include lawsuits, huge fines, and even jail. "Trouble" means violence. "Trouble" has shut down many a creative enterprise. So the threat of “trouble” dictates our choices about what we express. Copyright activates our internal censors. Internal censorship is the enemy of creativity; it halts expression before it can begin. The question, “am I allowed to use this?” indicates the asker has surrendered internal authority to lawyers, legislators, and corporations. This phenomenon is called Permission Culture. Whenever we censor our expression, we close a little more and information flows a little less. The less information flows, the more it stagnates. This is known as chilling effects. I have asked myself: did I ever consent to letting “Permission Culture” into my brain? Why am I complying with censorship? How much choice do I really have about what information goes in and comes out of me? The answer is: I have some choice regarding what I expose myself to, and what I express, but not total control. I can choose whether to watch mainstream media, for example. And I can choose what information to pass along. But to be in the world, and to be open, means all kinds of things can and do get in that are beyond my control. I don't get to choose what goes in based on its copyright status. In fact proprietary images and sounds are the most aggressively rammed into our heads. For example:

"Have a holly jolly Christmas, It's the best time of the year"I don't know if there'll be snow, but have a cup of cheer"Have a holly jolly Christmas, And when you walk down the street"Say hello to friends you know and everyone you meet!" I hate Christmas music. But because I live in the U.S., and need to leave the house even in the months of November and December, I can’t NOT hear it. It goes right through my earholes and into my brain, where it plays over and over ad nauseum. Here are some of the corporations I could “get in trouble with” for sharing that song and clip in public. I wasn't consulted by them before having their so-called "intellectual property" blasted into my head as a child, so I didn't ask their permission to put it in my slide show. Copyright is automatic and there’s no way to opt out. But you can add a license granting some of the permissions copyright automatically takes away. Creative Commons, the most widespread brand of license, allows its users to lift various restrictions of copyright one at a time. The problem with licenses is that they’re based on copyright law. The same threat of violence behind copyright is behind alternative licenses too. Licenses actually reinforce the mechanism of copyright. Everyone still needs to seek permission - it's just that they get it a little more often. Like copyright itself, licenses are often too complex for most people to understand. So licenses have the unfortunate effect of encouraging people to pay even MORE attention to copyright, which gives even more authority to that inner censor. And who let that censor into our heads in the first place? Although I use Free licenses and would appreciate meaningful copyright reform, licenses and laws aren’t the solution. The solution is more and more people just ignoring copyright altogether. I want to be one of those people. A few years ago I declared sovereignty over my own head. Freedom of Speech begins at home. Censorship and "trouble" still exist outside my head, and that's where they'll stay - OUTSIDE my head. I'm not going to assist bad laws and media corporations by setting up an outpost for them in my own mind. I no longer favor or reject works based on their copyright status. Ideas aren’t good or bad because of what licenses people slap on them. I just relate to the ideas themselves now, not the laws surrounding them. And I try to express myself the same way. Like millions of others who don’t give a rat’s ass about copyright, I hope you join me. Make Art, Not Law.

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.

The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

According to the document (from 2008), online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life are potentially "target-rich environments" in which suspected terrorists "hide in plain sight." (And it's not just MMOs. Xbox Live has apparently been swept up in the surveillance efforts as well.) Despite this assertion, the documents contain no evidence that any terrorists have been uncovered by agents and analysts. In fact, experts and developers of games like these have found no evidence that terrorists are using their services to communicate or recruit new members.

Once again, the efforts of the NSA and GCHQ seem to be focusing time and energy searching locations where terrorists would be least likely to be "hiding in plain sight," much in the way that grabbing data from mainstream email services and social platforms is only going to find the most amateurish of wrongdoers.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

Not only is the effort highly inefficient, but it's also highly redundant. As ProPublica points out, there are so many agents from the Pentagon, CIA and FBI chasing targets in virtual worlds that a "deconfliction" group was created just to avoid online "collisions."

Blizzard, the developer behind World of Warcraft, has gone on record stating that if intelligence agencies are using the service to track terrorists, it hasn't been informed or given its permission. Microsoft and Linden Lab (Second Life's developer) declined to comment.

There may be a good reason Linden Lab isn't issuing a statement. Its former CTO is an ex-military officer with top secret clearance.

In 2007, as the NSA and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, NSA officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the NSA with a top-secret security clearance.

He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement. It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.”

GCHQ, in particular, has used Second Life to track down a crime ring selling stolen credit card information. While the use of these games in discovering and tracking terrorists still remains largely theoretical, GCHQ found the online games did offer one benefit:

According to the minutes of a January 2009 meeting, GCHQ’s “network gaming exploitation team” had identified engineers, embassy drivers, scientists and other foreign intelligence operatives to be World of Warcraft players — potential targets for recruitment as agents.

The NSA, on the other hand, seems to have found little more than evidence that terrorism suspects are largely like non-terrorists when they play online games -- they do it for enjoyment.

One NSA document said that the World of Warcraft monitoring “continues to uncover potential Sigint value by identifying accounts, characters and guilds related to Islamic extremist groups, nuclear proliferation and arms dealing.” In other words, targets of interest appeared to be playing the fantasy game, though the document does not indicate that they were doing so for any nefarious purposes.

Whether or not these agencies are actually hunting down terrorists, one this is for certain: large amounts of communications are being caught in the surveillance nets.

One document says that while GCHQ was testing its ability to spy on Second Life in real time, British intelligence officers vacuumed up three days’ worth of Second Life chat, instant message and financial transaction data, totaling 176,677 lines of data, which included the content of the communications.

Not surprisingly, there's also a profit motive tied into this infiltration of online games. SAIC, a government contractor specializing in surveillance systems (and building non-functional, incredibly expensive software), may have set this online surveillance in motion back in 2007.

In one 66-page document from 2007, part of the cache released by Mr. Snowden, the contracting giant SAIC promoted its ability to support “intelligence collection in the game space,” and warned that online games could be used by militant groups to recruit followers and could provide “terrorist organizations with a powerful platform to reach core target audiences.”

ProPublica notes that there's nothing in the documents that suggests SAIC ended up with a contract (at that time) as a result of its self-promotion, but it does appear that SAIC (along with Lockheed Martin) won a multi-million dollar contract a couple of years later, shortly after it participated in a discussion about a proposed government study of the link between online and offline behavior in MMO gamers.

The question is how useful these infiltrations have been after a half-decade of use. The agencies have stated they feel these games could be used for communication and recruitment, but nothing has surfaced indicating the surveillance is effective. It largely seems to be another way to gather data, something the agencies already have too much of. If nothing else, GCHQ seems to be using it for a headhunting tool, but I'm not sure how many potential employees would be flattered to know they've been "scouted" by a questionable surveillance program. For now, it seems to be another case of the reach far exceeding the grasp, not that this lack of success ever seems to result in scaling back the "reach."

from the it's-everyone's-business dept

Verizon and AT&T have remained remarkably silent concerning all of the reports of NSA surveillance, which is fairly incredible, given that it appears that they have been the major players in basically handing over full access to their backbone networks to the NSA -- even to the point of volunteering to do so, rather than having to wait for a court order. It's no surprise that, unlike various internet companies, the telcos have not been at all supportive of attempts to allow for greater transparency over how companies work with the NSA.

However, as we noted last month, a bunch of shareholders have filed shareholder proposals with both companies, demanding that they start to file transparency reports concerning how they cooperate with government surveillance. AT&T
has flat out rejected this request, saying it won't even include the proposed resolution on the ballot at the annual AT&T shareholder's meeting.

The basic argument? It's none of your business. The letter, embedded below, argues that decisions about transparency are "ordinary business matters" not subject to shareholder approval. Furthermore, it argues that "protecting customer privacy is a management function" rather than a shareholder one. Of course, the issue here is that they're not protecting customer privacy, and the shareholders are pointing out that the concern is that in doing so, it could do serious damage to the company by losing the trust of their customers. AT&T, of course, doesn't care about any of that because, really, who else are customers going to go to?

from the incredible dept

On Friday the case against the US government, brought by Rahinah Ibrahim over her being placed on the "no fly list," officially concluded with closing arguments, but that may have been the least interesting part of everything. Apparently, the day got off to a rocky start, after Ibrahim's lawyers informed the DOJ that they intended to file bar complaints against some of the DOJ legal team for their actions in court, specifically concerning "misrepresentations" made to the court. It seems clear that this was mainly about the DOJ denying that the US government (mainly DHS) had done anything to prevent Ibrahim's daughter, Raihan Mustafa Kamal, an American citizen, from coming to the US to be a witness in the trial. As you may recall, on Monday it had come out that she had been denied in her attempt to board her flight in Malaysia, and the DOJ claimed, flat out, that Kamal had merely missed her flight and rebooked on another flight.

Instead, while Kamal had been rebooked by her travel agent earlier in the week to a different flight (because Expedia informed her that her original flight was full and she wouldn't be able to travel on it), she arrived at the airport with nearly 3 hours to spare for her own flight, and was then denied the ability to board. There was a lot of back and forth, but eventually she obtained the email that had first been sent to Philippines Airlines (she was flying from Malaysia to the Philippines and then on to San Francisco), warning that Kamal was "a possible no board request."

While that's not a full on "denial" it was enough to have the airline deny her passage, and clearly shows that, contrary to the DOJ's claims, DHS specifically had targeted Kamal and was hinting very strongly to airlines not to let her fly. It seems unlikely that they ever expected that email to get out. Either way, Kamal had spent nearly $2,000 of her own money on the original flight, and noted in her own deposition that she was unable to afford another immediate flight to the US (especially given that it's holiday travel season).

Judge Alsup held a closed hearing about all of this, so it's not entirely clear what he's going to do, though from the public statements he has made to date, he did not appear to be happy about all of this. During the closing arguments -- some of which involved kicking the public out -- he even noted how ridiculous it was that they had to have a closed session since he didn't think any of the "sensitive security information" was really that sensitive. He also challenged the government's argument that they can properly review people who "appeal" their status without ever letting anyone know if or why they're on the list. From Edward Hasbrouck's transcript of the exchange:

JUDGE ALSUP: That's just going back to the same sources that were wrong in the first place, and of course they are going to say, “We were right the first time.”

It was a low point for America, to do that wrongly to an American hero.

You’re not seeing the other side of what can happen.

DEFENDANTS’ COUNSEL: TRIP is a continually improving process…

JUDGE ALSUP: We know that there’s going to be mistakes in your system, in any system, and people are going to get hurt.

What do we need? Should there be some sort of follow-up FBI interview to find out if there is contrary evidence?

DEFENDANTS’ COUNSEL: When a TRIP letter is sent, the recipient is offered the possibility of review by a Court of Appeals. Review by a Court of Appeals would reveal any improper basis for the decision.

JUDGE ALSUP: How could the Court of Appeals tell that from the file it is handed up by the agency?

Even if it includes the derogatory information, how is the Court of Appeals going to know from looking at the face of the document whether it’s true?

Couldn’t there be some process where you tell the person the nature of the allegations (”You contributed money to Al Qaeda”) without revealing the specific sources or methods for the information containing those allegations?

DEFENDANTS’ COUNSEL: We can say more in closed session, but we can’t do that.

The government also appeared to admit in its closing that the original no fly determination on Dr. Ibrahim was a mistake, but then seems to bend over backwards not to take responsibility for all the additional fallout from that incorrect designation -- including the repeated denial of a visa to go back to the US (even for this very trial).

from the forms-own-Ministry-of-Information;-immediately-burns-it-to-the-ground dept

AP investigative journalists Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman memorably proclaimed the NYPD to be "less transparent than CIA, FBI and NSA" when it came to responding to FOI requests. Apparently, the NYPD finds this assessment of its obfuscation skills to be underwhelming, as other notable entities like "the Kremlin in its Cold War prime" and "the North Korean Ministry of People's Security 1948-present" were not included in the journalists' depiction of the department.

The NYPD has ordered the city's 77 police precincts to stop giving out any information to the media about crimes taking place in their neighborhoods, cutting off a long-standing source of information for New Yorkers.

According to a terse NYPD edict transmitted citywide, precinct commanders were instructed: “Any requests by media to view complaint reports be referred to the office of the Deputy Commissioner For Public Information.”

Every Wednesday morning, a reporter from The Nabe visits the 88th Precinct and is handed forms outlining the previous week’s felony crime reports, which includes information on all murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary or theft or property in the precinct. The reporter copies down the information, asks the officers lingering questions from the reports and writes up the crime blotter post. This will no longer be allowed. Reporters must now contact the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information (DCPI) for all crime inquiries, according to the officer.

Funneling everything through the DCPI creates an info bottleneck, as is surely the intention of this new policy. A source inside the police department said the DCPI is a "small unit" and would most likely be unable to cope with the influx of information requests.

Not only that, but the DCPI has already been pushed by Chief Ray Kelly to clamp down on the amount of information it releases to the public.

Under his stewardship, DCPI has systematically diminished the type of information it provides as well as overall access to department personnel. The clampdown evolved even though Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a media mogul, pledged that his administration would be a beacon of open government and transparency.

This leaves journalists with two options: queueing up for whatever scraps the DPCI might throw in its direction or filing FOIL requests. The latter is even less likely to result in any response, much less a timely one. The NYPD's antagonistic attitude toward public information requests is well-documented. As Salon noted earlier this year, the NYPD stalls or denies a majority of requests, only begrudgingly parting with information when civil liberties groups (like the New York Civil Liberties Union) get involved.

So, unless journalists have an infinite amount of time and the willingness to go to court to battle for information they're rightfully entitled to have, the NYPD will simply be able to play a waiting game, hoping those looking for info simply give up once the info requested loses its timeliness.

from the vote-vote-vote dept

Agents from the National Intelligence Service of South Korea posted more than 1.2 million Twitter messages last year to try to sway public opinion in favor of Park Geun-hye, then a presidential candidate, and her party ahead of elections in 2012, state prosecutors said on Thursday.

As the New York Times post quoted above goes on to explain, the whole story is rather murky and complicated. One of the curious claims being made by the Korean spy agency accused of interfering with the election process is the following:

The intelligence service said its online messages were posted as part of normal psychological warfare operations against North Korea, which it said used the Internet to criticize South Korean government policies, forcing its agents to defend them online. In a statement on Thursday, it also accused the prosecutors of citing as their evidence online postings that had nothing to do with its agents.

Even if that's true, other departments may have gone beyond simply defending the government of South Korea to attack its political rivals:

In a separate inquiry, military investigators are looking into South Korea's Cyberwarfare Command after it was revealed last month in Parliament that some of its officials had conducted a similar online campaign against opposition candidates. The Cyberwarfare Command was created in 2010 to guard South Korea against hacking threats from North Korea.

That raises a very real problem with these kinds of online operations: they can easily be misused for purely political purposes, and oversight is easy to evade, since it's all about moving bits around. Of course, exactly the same could be said about the blanket surveillance being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ....